J. Coetzee - Elizabeth Costello

Men and their leering talk. She has no illusions about how mortal beings treat whatever gods, true or feigned, ancient or modern, have the misfortune to fall into their hands. She thinks of a film she saw once, that might have been written by Nathanael West though in fact it wasn't: Jessica Lange playing a Hollywood sex goddess who has a breakdown and ends up in the common ward of a madhouse, drugged, lobotomized, strapped to her bed, while orderlies sell tickets for ten minutes a time with her. 'I wanna fuck a movie star!' pants one of their customers, shoving his dollars at them. In his voice the ugly underside of idolatry: malice, murderous resentment. Bring an immortal down to earth, show her what life is really like, bang her till she is raw. Take that! Take that! A scene they excised from the televised version, so close to the bone of America does it cut.

But in Anchises' case the goddess, when she rose from his bed, warned her sweetheart pretty plainly to keep his mouth shut. So there was nothing left for a prudent fellow to do but lose himself, last thing at night, in drowsy memories: how it had felt, man's flesh lapped in god flesh; or else, when he was in a more sober, more philosophically inclined mood, to wonder: since the physical mingling of two orders of being, and in specific the interplay of human organs with whatever stands in for organs in the biology of gods, is strictly speaking not possible, not while the laws of nature continue to hold, what kind of being, what hybrid of slave body and god soul, must it have been that laughter-loving Aphrodite transformed herself into, for the space of a night, in order to consort with him? Where was the mighty soul when he took in his arms the incomparable body? Tucked away in some out-of-the-way compartment, in a tiny gland in the skull, for instance; or spread harmlessly through the physical whole as a glow, an aura? Yet even if, for his sake, the soul of the goddess was hidden, how could he not, when her limbs gripped him, have felt the fire of godly appetite – felt it and been scorched by it? Why did it have to be spelled out to him, the next morning, what had really happened ('Her head touched the roof-beam, her face shone with immortal beauty, Wake up, she said, behold me, do I look like the one who knocked at your door last night?')'? How could any of it have taken place unless he, the man, was under a spell from beginning to end, a spell like an anaesthetic to blanket the fearful knowledge that the maiden he had disrobed, embraced, parted the thighs of, penetrated, was an immortal, a trance to protect him from the unendurable pleasure of godlike lovemaking, allowing him only the duller sensations of a mortal? Yet why would a god, having chosen for herself a mortal lover, put that same lover under such a spell that for the duration he was not himself?

That is how it would have been for poor bewildered Anchises, one would imagine, for the rest of his life: a whirl of questions, none of which he would dare to air to his fellow cattlemen except in the most general form, for fear of being struck dead in his tracks.

Yet that is not how it was, not according to the poets. If one is to believe the poets, Anchises led a normal life thereafter, a distinguished but normal human life, until the day his city was set ablaze by foreigners and he was plunged into exile. If he did not forget that signal night, he did not think overmuch about it, not as we understand thinking.

That is the main thing she would have liked to ask Robert Duncan about, as an expert on extraordinary intercourse, the thing she fails to understand about the Greeks, or if Anchises and his son were not Greeks but Trojans, foreigners, then about Greeks and Trojans together as archaic eastern Mediterranean peoples and subjects of Hellenic myth-making. She calls it their lack of inwardness. Anchises has been intimate with a divine being, as intimate as intimate can be. Not a common experience. In the whole of Christian mythology, setting aside the Apocrypha, there is only one parallel event, and that in the commoner form, with the male god – rather impersonally, rather distantly, it must be said – impregnating the mortal woman. Magnificat Dominum anima mea, Mary is reputed to have said afterwards, perhaps misheard from Magnam me facit Dominus. That is pretty much all she says in the Gospels, this maid who is matchless, as though struck dumb for the rest of her life by what befell her. No one around her has the shamelessness to enquire, What was it like, how did it feel, how did you bear it ? Yet the question must surely have occurred to people, to her girlfriends in Nazareth for instance. How did she bear it? they must have whispered among themselves. It must have been like being fucked by a whale. It must have been like being fucked by the Leviathan; blushing as they spoke the word, those barefoot children of the tribe of Judah, as she, Elizabeth Costello, almost catches herself blushing too, setting it down on paper. Rude enough among Mary's countryfolk; positively indecent in someone two millennia older and wiser.

Psyche, Anchises, Mary: there must be better, less prurient, more philosophical ways of thinking about the whole god-and-man business. But has she the time or the equipment, to say nothing of the inclination, to do so?

Inwardness. Can we be one with a god profoundly enough to apprehend, to get a sense of, a god's being? A question that no one seems to ask any more, except to an extent her new find Susan Mitchell, who is not a philosopher either; a question that went out of fashion during her lifetime (she remembers it happening, remembers her surprise), just as it came into fashion not too long before her lifetime commenced. Other modes of being. That may be a more decent way of phrasing it. Are there other modes of being besides what we call the human into which we can enter; and if there are not, what does that say about us and our limitations? She does not know much about Kant, but it sounds to her a Kantian kind of question. If her ear is right, then inwardness started its run with the man from Königsberg and ended, more or less, with Wittgenstein the Viennese destroyer.

'Gods do exist,' 'writes Friedrich Hölderlin, who had read his Kant, 'but they carry on their lives somewhere up above us in another realm, not much interested, it would seem, in whether we exist or not.' In bygone times those gods bestrode the earth, walked among men. But to us modern folk it is no longer given to catch a glimpse of them, much less suffer their love. 'We come too late.'

She reads less and less widely as she grows older. A not uncommon phenomenon. For Hölderlin, however, she always has time. Great-souled Hölderlin she would call him if she were Greek. Nevertheless, about Hölderlin on the gods she has her doubts. Too innocent, she thinks, too ready to take things at face value; not alert enough to the cunning of history. Things are rarely as they seem to be, she would like to instruct him. When we are stirred to lament the loss of the gods, it is more than likely the gods who are doing the stirring. The gods have not retreated: they cannot afford to.

Odd that the man who put his finger on the divine apatheia, the inability of the gods to feel, and their consequent need to have others do their feeling for them, should have failed to see the effects of apatheia on their erotic life.

Love and death. The gods, the immortals, were the inventors of death and corruption; yet with one or two notable exceptions they have lacked the courage to try their invention out on themselves. That is why they are so curious about us, so endlessly inquisitive. We call Psyche a silly, prying girl, but what was a god doing in her bed in the first place? In marking us down for death, the gods gave us an edge over them. Of the two, gods and mortals, it is we who live the more urgently, feel the more intensely. That is why they cannot put us out of their minds, cannot get by without us, ceaselessly watch us and prey on us. That, finally, is why they do not declare a ban on sex with us, merely make up rules about where and in what form and how often. Inventors of death; inventors of sex tourism too. In the sexual ecstasies of mortals, the frisson of death, its contortions, its relaxings: they talk about it endlessly when they have had too much to drink – who they first got to experience it with, what it felt like. They wish they had that inimitable little quiver in their own erotic repertoire, to spice up their couplings with each other. But the price is one they are not prepared to pay. Death, annihilation: what if there is no resurrection, they wonder misgivingly?